JFK: Volume 1: John F Kennedy: 1917-1956

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Tell me about JFK, the man—and your book about him, the first volume of your planned two-part biography, which I asked you to discuss as one among the five books you’ve named. Eder, Elizabeth. "Memory of a Nation: Effectively Using Artworks to Teach about the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" Social Education (November/December 2011), pp. 296-300. online Simpson, Bradley. Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations 1960-1968 (2008)

With impressive vision and flawless execution, Logevall bores down to a molecular level to put JFK’s life and achievements within the context of the history of the times, while simultaneously exposing the truths obscured by the most popular JFK misconceptions.” — Booklist (starred review) Kennedy kept wonderful diaries, which are quite useful from a biographer’s perspective, at various points in his life, particularly while travelling. This book, edited by Deirdre Henderson, is composed of what he wrote while he toured Europe in 1945, right after the Germans surrendered and immediately before the Japanese sued for peace. There is a foreword by Hugh Sidney, the journalist, who knew Kennedy quite well. The book is fascinating because it is a window into what a young Kennedy, just decommissioned from the Navy, was thinking as he’s seeing up-close the destruction wrought by World War II in Europe and interacting with a lot of high-powered people. He’s clearly fascinated by politics and by international relations. There is controversy about whether Kennedy wrote the book himself. My conclusion is that his role was crucial. His assistant, Ted Sorensen, drafted the case studies that compose the middle of the book, with help Jules David, a scholar at Georgetown. But Kennedy was responsible for the broad themes and the argument, as laid out in the introduction and the conclusion—the most important parts of the book, both then and today. Long before he met Sorensen, he had been fascinated by the concept of political courage and had honed his views on the matter. Newmann, William W. "Searching for the Right Balance? Managing Foreign Policy Decisions under Eisenhower and Kennedy." Congress & the Presidency 42#2 (2015). Although 40,000 books have been published about the Kennedys, according to the estimate of Jill Abramson, there are few serious efforts, prior to yours, to take comprehensive look at the life and times of JFK, America’s famous 35th president.

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Kazin, Michael (December 2017). "An Idol and Once a President: John F. Kennedy at 100." Journal of American History, 104#3 pp. 707–726. ISSN 0021-8723. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jax315. The Deep Politics Forum, https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?4-JFK-Assassination, attracts those who see a conspiracy everywhere they look, hence its unofficial title: the Deeply Paranoid Forum. Some of its members can be very intolerant of dissent. In particular, critics of the preposterous ‘Harvey and Lee’ theory are not welcomed here. Whether lone–nut or conspiracy, the more implausible the theory, the more religiously it is defended. Kunz, Diane B. The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations during the 1960s (1994)

Don DeLillo, after extensive reading of the 26 supporting volumes to the Warren report, presented Oswald in his 1988 novel, Libra, as the stooge of a CIA attempt to promote war with Cuba. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) begins with Castro’s coup and ends with the Dallas assassination, which the novel attributes to a conspiracy involving the Cuban interests of the CIA and the mafia. Pelz, Stephen E. "“When Do I Have Time to Think?” John F. Kennedy, Roger Hilsman, and the Laotian Crisis of 1962." Diplomatic History 3.2 (1979): 215-230. Ballard, Robert D. (2002). Collision With History: The Search for John F. Kennedy's PT 109. Washington, DC: National Geographic. ISBN 978-0-7922-6876-5. You’ve named a book by Sorensen next on your list of books to read about JFK. Before we talk about that one, I wanted to ask whether you think Kennedy can be seen as ‘a profile in courage’ for any stance that he took during his time in the Senate.

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Kaufman, Burton I. "John F. Kennedy as world leader: A perspective on the literature." Diplomatic History 17.3 (1993): 447-470. Powaski, Ronald E. "John F. Kennedy, the Hawks, the Doves, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962." in American Presidential Statecraft (2017) pp. 11-65. Oswald’s visit to Mexico City a few weeks before the assassination — the crucial event which caused the Warren Commission to be set up; Masterful . . . based on years toiling in the archives but written with a delightfully light touch . . . At times it reads more like a novel than a biography, so vivid is the prose and so extraordinary the material.” — The Economist

Informed criticism of the Warren Report began even before it was published, with Bertrand Russell, ‘16 Questions on the Assassination’, Minority of One, 6 September 1964, pp.6–8. The communist island also features in Oswald’s still-mysterious trip, weeks before the Kennedy shooting, to Mexico City, where he apparently hoped to secure a visa to defect to Cuba. What could be in the long-secret John F Kennedy files?Brauer, Carl. J (1977). John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231083676. Taffet, Jeffrey J. Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (2007) The Assassination Records and Review Board Report, available in PDF and .txt formats, and with each chapter available separately in PDF.